A day after the earthquake, I had gone into a tea shop at Kupondole to wait out the evening rain. I was supposed to meet a friend there and had enough time for a warm cup of tea. The conversations that day had all but some been about the quake yesterday and amongst talk of a comeback I was confident having read the morning papers quite carefully, that there were very diminished chances of that happening, thanks to numerous aftershocks the night earlier. Unfortunately for me though, I happened to ensue talk with the Sauni and obviously it was about yesterday:

“It shook here too, nicely?” I ask her.

“Ammui…ni, it did ni, so nicely. All of this was trembling”, she replies looking around the little ensemble of a shop.

“It won’t come back arey ni ta, I’d heard”, I continue, perhaps looking for some assurance.

A little girl speaks up now, “No it will come back again, tonight. The TV said that.”

“What nonsense!”, the Sauni snaps.

“Yes. Is the TV ever wrong?”

“You go on home now, go!” Sauni scolds her and she hurries away.

She turns to me now, and says, “It will come back tonight. At ten. Maybe it is also because we have committed so much sin, hai?”

I don’t know what to say to that so I just agree and add, “If only the quake came to those who sinned”.

“Right? Perhaps only they will die”.

I am unconvinced of her argument about the shake coming back. I put in the scientific rationale I had read in the papers earlier that morning: “Apparently there were a lot of after tremors yesterday night. So there is a greatly reduced chance of a repeat quake”.

She is undeterred: “No, apparently it was brought from India yesterday and it is coming back tonight again. At ten. Right?” she asks an old man smoking a cigarette nearby. He just shakes his head and turns to me solemn confidence. This scares me and I start dialing home and ask around if such talk was floating about. Nobody knows for sure. I was supposed to go somewhere else for the night but this prophecy shakes all of my logical assurances.

The quake doesn’t come, but the conversation at the shop had certainly done enough to keep me and my friend at nervous edges, more so for our families. “We talk and exaggerate too much yaar”, I complain to him later on. Bhupi Sherchan was certainly right to declare “This is a country of hearsay”. It seems like as Nepalis we do have it in us to exaggerate facts—a tendency to stretch things out sometimes with little rational understanding of the matter. At times of uncertain forthcomings and disasters this only stresses our situations. Perhaps it would do us better to be prepared for the logical worst but also help each other remain on optimistic grounds.

Chiya-Pasaley loves tea and writes about conversations that originate along the hours spent on drinking many cups of it. Besides that he is curious about many things and especially the rural-urban divide, and the coming of modernization to Nepal. He writes on the mundane and the very fantastic, and everything in between.